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Obama’s church and its pastor
We’re seeing articles like this NYT piece about Barack Obama and his church every so often. For previous posts on this subject, go here, here, and here. I’ve also written on his most extensive statement on the relationship between religion and politics here. Herewith a few newish thoughts about Obama, his church, and his pastor. First, let’s do Obama the courtesy of letting him speak for himself on the relationship between religion and politics. We shouldn’t identify him with his pastor, unless his own words or deeds compel the identification. Conservatives who don’t want Mitt Romney’s Mormonism (and caricatures about it) to be the first and last words about him and who don’t want the justices in the majority in Gonzales v. Carhart to be drawn with mitres on their heads should practice what they preach when it comes to the relationship between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Second, this doesn’t mean we can’t probe Obama’s biography for clues about his attitude toward religion and his religious views. Our paleo friend Dan Phillips thinks Obama is a more or less straight social gospel type. I think there’s a lot of social gospel worldliness to him, but he occasionally gestures in deeper and more interesting directions, as when he complicates his narrative about poverty by pointing to brokenness and personal responsibility. Some of this comes from the "self-help" tradition in black churches. You occasionally even see it in Jesse Jackson’s rhetoric (though it’s been a long time since I’ve paid much attention to him and probably an equally long time since he took his own words at all seriously). Such words are worth applauding, but the all-too-statist social and political recommendations that usually accompany them (both from Jackson and from Obama) still need to be answered and criticized, not as theological or religious statements, but as analyses of what works in dealing with poverty and other social pathologies.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/30/2007 9:40 PM
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Fred Ahead in the "Blog Primary"
Thompson’s numbers are impressive, but he may have, the blogger astutely notes, the popularity of a second-string quarterback on a losing term. People can’t help but imagine that things would be different if he were in the game, and he hasn’t fumbled yet because he hasn’t played yet.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/30/2007 7:44 PM
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Happy Birthday Willie Nelson!
You have to love his distinctive voice and tireless devotion to performing and recording.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [17] | 4/29/2007 11:01 PM
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Leave It to Deaver
One of Reagan’s main men sees Law-and-Order Fred as another actor who’s also a man of substance. We’re reminded of the Gipper’s memorable comment that he just couldn’t see how "any fellow who wasn’t an actor" could get the presidential job done. And Hollywood has known for a while that Fred "personnifies government power." Because each of the other candidates’ flaws are inching toward fatal, now it really is Thompson’s moment to take the Oval Office screen test by actually getting into the race. A movie in which he actually plays a president--the Grant being rehabilitated on all fronts--opens next month.
(Thanks to Ivan the K.)
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [6] | 4/29/2007 10:41 PM
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The Rebels
This review of Sandor Marai’s novel, The Rebels, is worth mentioning because (just maybe) this guy is the best Hungarian novelist ever. The Rebels was first published in 1930, just now translated. Marai was born in 1900 and died in San Diego in 1989, by his own hand. He is a rare writer for that part of the world, not affected by the insanities of Fascism or Communism. Bad guys always hated him. I listened to my mother (once) and read him in Hungarian (she met him once in Southern California, in one of her literary circles) and thought it pretty good. It’s easier in English. He’s thoughtful, fluid, and a bit lean in his prose, with good characters, universally recognizable, but Hungarian. I will read this as I have his Embers, which I mentioned here.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/29/2007 8:37 PM
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Anbar province
Good news from Anbar prvince, according to a front page New York Times article: "Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/29/2007 8:32 PM
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Mitt’s Foreign Policy Vision
Well, it may be short on eloquence. But it’s full of good sense, on why we can’t let a possibly suicidal nation have nuclear weapons, on the demographic challenge of Islam, and on why we still have all the decisive advantages unless we do nothing. Some of Law-and-Order Fred’s writers should volunteer to make Romney’s prose more punchy and genuinely memorable.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/29/2007 8:36 AM
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Choice Informed by Ultrasound
I think the article by Saletan linked by Joe below is actually quite good. Although basically a pro-choice guy, he sees no problem with women being presented with all the information available before making the grave choice concerning abortion. Darwinian conservative Larry Arnhart adds that evolution intends that we use both reason and emotion to decide what to do with embryos and fetuses. It’s impossible for us, Larry contends, to connect emotionally with an embryo that looks nothing like us, and it’s natural that the more the fetus resembles us the more we want to protect him or her. Larry agrees with his fellow sociobiologist James Q. Wilson that it’s proper that we endow a fetus with more and more humanity or moral worth over the course of a pregnancy. But is humanity really ours to endow, and are our emotions really reliable? Joe also gives us the link to the speech by Nick Eberstadt about the global effect of sonograms: It seems that many parents throughout the world can’t identity with images of females fetuses, and the result has been lots of abortions that have disturbed significantly the natural ratio between boys and girls. Killing that privileges testosterone is dangerous in all sorts of ways.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/28/2007 10:44 PM
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From White to Ginsburg
Bill Richardson claims to like ’em both, and Matt Franck tries to figure out how that could be. His guess is as good as--actually better than--mine.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/28/2007 10:59 PM
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Lind on Starr on liberalism
Michael Lind praises Paul Starr’s new book, whose principal arguments are summarized here. My sense is that Starr overemphasizes the continuity between what he calls "constitutional liberalism" and "modern democratic liberalism." The latter is much less focused on individual rights and responsibilities and much more willing to use the power of the state on behalf of equality. If in America there is inevitably a tension between equality and liberty, Starr seems unaware of it or blithely willing to resolve the tension on behalf of equality. Stated another way, like the liberalism of many of his colleagues, Starr’s liberalism is pragmatic and unwilling squarely to confront the "unnatural" expansion of state power required to accomplish the aims he holds dear.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [8] | 4/28/2007 7:50 PM
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Saletan on ultrasounds
William Saletan gives some thought to the craze for bills requiring women considering abortions to view an ultrasound of their children in utero. They are part of a legislative tidal wave provoked by the Gonzales v. Carhart tsunami (O.K., I know that’s rhetorical excess). Saletan notes that some ultrasound advocates are concerned whether this appeal to our natural emotions will work. If this is any indication, there’s some reason for concern. This is certainly a test of the strength of natural compassion, as opposed to interest or culture.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [11] | 4/28/2007 7:40 PM
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America at 400
Richard Brookhiser reminds us that this month is the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown. Of course, people lived here before then--Native Americans and even a great number of Europeans who were trappers, etc.--but this was a real venture; a venture that Brookhiser argues fittingly prefigured our character as a people. A few good lines: "It was a project of the London Co., a group of merchants with a royal patent: Imagine that Congress gave Wal-Mart and General Electric permission to colonize Mars." The general assembly first met for five days in the summer of 1619. It discussed Indian relations, church attendance, gambling, drunkenness and the price of tobacco. It sounds like the Iowa caucuses: war and peace, social issues, bread and butter. From this seed would grow the House of Burgesses, the elective house of Virginia’s colonial legislature and the political academy of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In their rough-and-ready way, the Jamestown settlers had planted the seeds of a dynamic system, democratic capitalism, along with an institution that would pervert it, chattel slavery, and a force that would supply the cure, the goal of liberty. The settlers came with ideas they had to junk. Some of their brightest hopes were false. They worked hard and got other people to do their work for them. They were foolish, fierce and surprisingly stubborn. When one thing failed, they tried another. We are their descendants. But read the whole thing.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments | 4/28/2007 7:31 PM
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Is Obama a neocon?
Robert Kagan wonders. Of course, talk is cheap, and in South Carolina, Obama showed a different side. As Kagan reflects, So maybe his speech only reflects what he and his advisers think Americans want to hear. But that is revealing, too. When it comes to America’s role in the world, apparently they don’t think there’s much of an argument. I know that our paleo readers will say that this says more about the neocons than about Obama and the Democrats, but Kagan may be right that Festung Amerika isn’t either realistic or principled.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [11] | 4/28/2007 7:27 PM
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How big the Democratic tent?
Dan Gilgoff raises that question about the conservative evangelical populist Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi. John Arthur Eaves might give Haley Barbour a run for his money in Mississippi, but, even in the apparently unlikely event that he wins, I can’t imagine him having any real influence in the national Democratic party.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/28/2007 7:23 PM
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Evangelicals in 2008
The WSJ’s Naomi Schaefer Riley interviews Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He can’t support Giuliani, could support Romney, and rather likes Fred Thompson. "Evangelicals would be very happy if Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback or Duncan Hunter were the nominee, but the problem with those three guys is they don’t give any indication they can win." And he adds, "With Hillary Clinton looming on the horizon, electability is a very important issue."*** If Mr. Giuliani does somehow win the nomination, Mr. Land predicts that "you will see a drop in evangelical participation in the presidential election and in races below that." Sounding more like a preacher warning of a coming plague, Mr. Land says, "even if the alternative is Hillary," a lot of evangelicals will stay home.
Returning to his political wonk persona, Mr. Land notes that in 2006, about a quarter of voters identified as white evangelicals, and 70% of them voted for Republicans. The three quarters who didn’t identify as white evangelicals voted 61-37 for Democrats. Which means, according to Mr. Land, "that Republicans can’t win elections just with evangelicals, but without them, Republicans face a loss of apocalyptic proportions." I’m not certain that I agree with the last point, as it assumes that no Republican could do better than GWB did with non-evangelical voters. Wouldn’t Giuliani do better than GWB with non-evangelicals, especially since evangelicals seem to be allergic to him? And doesn’t HRC have her own problems with folks other than evangelicals?
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [6] | 4/28/2007 7:21 AM
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In its Next Issue, The New Republic Urges Bill Clinton to Overcome His Shyness Around Girls
This week’s Coals to Newcastle award for headline writing goes to the New Republic editor who came up with, “Democrats: Don’t Be Afraid to Spend Money.” The (subscription only) article by Bradford Plumer deserved better wrapping paper. It describes how the Democratic party “has backed itself into a corner by carping so loudly about the Bush administration’s prodigal ways.” After six years of denouncing deficit spending, and a mid-term election that empowered them to do something about it, some Democrats are suddenly wondering if massive borrowing is really so bad after all. The Economic Policy Institute recently hosted a forum, “Beyond Balanced Budget Mania.” According to Plumer, “The purpose was to persuade Democrats that they could spend responsibly without sacrificing liberalism at the altar of fiscal rectitude.” Plumer assured us that no one at the EPI event urged “the Democrats should just go wild and spend, spend, spend.” In fact, none of them really outlined “a detailed vision of what tax and spending levels they’d like to see.” But the general idea was that some combination of tax increases, health care cost controls, and lightening up about deficits would leave “ample room for growth in discretionary spending and public investment,” amounting to “tens of billions of dollars per year” for expanding child care and health insurance coverage, or developing new energy sources. If Democrats are going to embark on these missions then, clearly, something’s got to give. Deficit reduction is one likely suspect. Increasing taxes is the other obvious one. But here, too, they’re backed into a corner by six years of their own rhetoric denouncing “massive giveaways to the rich.” The Democratic presidential candidates favor John Kerry’s approach, promising to raise taxes only on households with annual incomes in excess of $200,000. That means the most prosperous 3% of the population will face higher taxes, according to the New York Times. Leaving the Bush tax cuts in place for families making under $200,000, however, will yield the Treasury $900 billion less than it would receive over the coming decade if all the tax cuts are repealed. As the Times says, “leaving even a portion of the Bush tax cuts in place means that the next president and the next Congress would have less money to allocate to spending programs than they would if they allowed all the tax cuts to expire, leaving them with a choice between further increasing the budget deficit or limiting their plans for addressing health care, education, energy and other needs.” The $200,000 boundary better serves Democrats’ political needs than their policy ambitions. They’ll make 32 times as many friends as enemies by confining tax increases to the wealthiest 3% of the population. They just won’t get the money required to do the things they’re really enthused about – health care, education, alternative energy, midnight basketball, indigent wildlife, blah, blah, blah – and the things they’re not enthused about but are afraid to oppose, military spending and deficit reduction. They could get hold of more money if they lowered the $200,000 threshold for tax increases, but that moves the friends/enemies ratio in a politically dangerous direction. The world has changed a lot since Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote The Ethics of Redistribution in 1952. Its central contention remains valid, however: the prosperity of modern societies is widely dispersed rather than narrowly concentrated. Soaking the rich doesn’t work because there aren’t enough really rich people to soak. Something must be curtailed – either the agenda of the left or the after-tax incomes of the middle class.
Posted by William Voegeli | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/27/2007 4:07 PM
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Iraq
Here is the video General Petreaus� news conference of yesterday. About an hour long. Worth some of your time. Smart guy. Michael O�Hanlon (of Brookings) did an interview with Hugh Hewitt about Iraq that is (unsurprisingly) thoughtful. I have noticed a more serious conversation over the last few days even by the ordinary media (CNN, et al) about Iraq and the consequences of a quick retreat. Even some opponents of Bush�s policy are starting to publicly admit that it would be a horror. This is related to the Democrats� success in attempting to force a withdrawl via the spending bill, which more fully reveals their arrogance (never mind Harry Reid�s audiable stupidity and Pelosi�s decision not to meet with Petreaus). Everyone�s mind may be starting to focus now on the future, rather than taking revenge on Bush for the past (i.e., for going into Iraq in the first place). The other good effect of all this is that the Iraqis� minds should become even more focused: they are one out away from the ninth inning. Show us what stuff you are made of, before the Dems fully take over. Don�t wait. And whatever good you do will have consequences for both American and Iraqi politics. Also read this op-ed by O�Hanlon.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/27/2007 9:59 AM
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